Oprah Winfrey – praag.org

America: Your benefactor is NEVER the state

The marketplace brings plenty; the state does the opposite. Yet not a day goes by when consumers, ignorant of the forces that feed, clothe, cure, employ, entertain them and innovate for them, don’t demand that those who’ve done nothing of the kind – the McCains, Obamas, Bushes, Clintons, Keith Alexanders, Lois Lerners, Eric Holders of the world – proceed with force against those who do nothing but.

Expect the anti-Wal-Mart jousting to begin, because Wal-Mart has done it again. To fill the need created by the Obamacare wrecking ball, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is venturing into the business of providing primary health care. For $40, the price of a copay (in an Obama-mandated, sub-par health-care plan), “you can walk into a Wal-Mart clinic and see a doctor.” It’s “just $4 for Wal-Mart U.S. employees and family members.”

Rejoice, Sandra Fluke! You can have a pregnancy test at Wal-Mart for … $3.

Via Market Watch:

On Friday, a Wal-Mart Care Clinic opened in Dalton, Ga., six months after Wal-Mart U.S., the retailer’s biggest unit, entered the business of providing primary health care. It now operates a dozen clinics in rural Texas, South Carolina and Georgia and has increased its target for openings this year to 17. … A typical retail clinic offers acute care only. But a Wal-Mart Care Clinic also treats chronic conditions such as diabetes. (Wal-Mart U.S. also leases space in its stores to 94 clinics owned by others that set their own pricing.) “It was very important to us that we establish a retail price in the health-care industry because price leadership matters to us,” said Jennifer LaPerre, a Wal-Mart U.S. senior director responsible for health and wellness, in an interview.

Hear, hear!

The argument against Wal-Mart presses its case with an impressive array of economic fallacies. Typically, the critic – an example is “The High Cost of Low Prices,” in The American Conservative – does nothing to trace the mysterious mechanism by which Wal-Mart is said to impoverish. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What precisely is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what The American Conservative’s writer advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

The writer also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” It sounds dreadful. However, the economic reality is this: Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it were paying less or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More materially, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do once Wal-Mart departs?

Even the Hollywood “Idiocracy” is hip to the spontaneously synchronized order that is the free market. Just for a change, the menstruation lobby is moaning about the movies and its members’ representation therein. By Variety Magazine’s telling, “[Female] characters are still significantly under-represented on the big screen. … The numbers for minority females are even lower. African-American female representation on screen [has] climbed to 14 percent, from 8 percent in 2011, but [is] down from 15 percent in 2012.”

The presence of minorities in movies often signals a two-hour long, oppressive racial lecture. Most movie-goers are no more inclined to turn to “12 Years A Slave” for fun, than they are to subject themselves to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) “Butler.”

Anti-man moaning notwithstanding, the general public must be on to this, because it is quite clear that Hollywood is giving viewers what they want to see: men in lead roles. If film executives listened to the loathsome Lena Dunham, rather than to the demands of consumers – the industry would go under.

Alas, most liberals (and that includes “conservatives” aplenty) are foolish enough to lump business with government as an eternal source of disappointment to Americans. Noodles Ron Fournier of National Journal:

“Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government.”

As I type, I consume a plate of seven different fruits topped with nuts. Many of the ingredients on my plate are organic. These used to be exorbitantly priced; out of reach. But as demand for organic produce has grown, production has increased and prices have dropped dramatically.

Each day I give thanks to the businessmen who, against all odds, bring such abundance to market and provide such plenty. There is nothing in my home that comes courtesy of the blessings of bureaucrats. I guarantee that it’s the same in your home.

If you, like Fournier, fail to distinguish the blessings of the private economy from the blight of government – you deserve none of the former and all of the latter.

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Oprah Winfrey is delusional about racism, white and black

by Gregory Kane

Ah, the tenets of Libthink, one of which is that anyone opposed to the policies of one President Obama is, by definition, a racist.

A second is that only whites can be racist. Another is that no black person, anywhere, at any time and under any circumstances, can be a racist.

And now, courtesy of none other than Oprah Winfrey, those white racists need to die for America to enter racial Shangri La.

Oprah’s on a tour. She was recently in Great Britain to promote her movie “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”

A correspondent for the BBC asked her if she felt that racism was the reason some Americans opposed Obama and his policies. Oprah, the one person responsible, more than any other, for Obama being president, of course said yes.

But she said much more than that. Specifically, she said this when asked if the problem of racism in America had been solved:

“Of course the problem [of racism] is not solved. … As long as there are people who still— there’s a whole generation — I say this, you know, I said this, you know, for apartheid, South Africa, I said this for my own, you know, for my own community in the South — there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.”

In one quick, thoughtless breath, Oprah added another tenet to Libthink: Not only are all racists white, but they also need to “just die,” every last one of them.

Once all those old, white racists “who were born and bred and marinated in it” have died, then America will be forever purged of racism.

Make that “white racism,” and remember, according to Libthink doctrine, that’s the only racism worth mentioning.

The racism that blacks might hold for non-blacks, that Latinos might hold for non-Latinos and that Asians might hold for non-Asians won’t go away of course, no matter how much adherents of Libthink doctrine might wish it were so.

There will continue to be the attacks that black thugs make against white victims, some of which (if not all) have to be at least partially motivated by race.

That black vs. Latino racist conflict won’t end after all those old white folks “bred and marinated in racism” die.

Said conflict has been going on for years. You might have seen an episode about it on Oprah’s show when it was on the air.

What’s that? You never heard about what happened to Cheryl Green on Oprah’s show? Well, there might be a reason for that.

Oprah, her brain steeped in Libthink as it is, probably didn’t figure this tale of Latino-on-black violence was worth doing a show about.

Green was only 14 years old when a Latino gang member fatally shot her in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles on Dec. 15, 2006.

Four years later, Jonathan Fajardo was found guilty of Green’s murder. He was also found guilty of a hate crime, which means Green’s murder was racially motivated.

This wasn’t a murder carried out by some old, “bred and marinated”-in-racism white person Oprah holds in such disdain. At the time of Green’s murder, Fajardo, a Latino man, was only 18 years old.

So Oprah’s notion that racism is the exclusive worldview of the old and the white appears to be utter nonsense.

In the early 1990s, a Korean-American named Joel Lee was fatally shot on the streets of Baltimore.

Witnesses identified a distinctly not old and distinctly not white African American male as the shooter. At his trial, witnesses also told of the utter hatred he had for Asians.

A predominantly black jury acquitted him. In spite of Oprah’s delusions, racism won’t end once all those old, “bred and marinated in racism” whites die.

Gregory Kane, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.

First published in the Washington Examiner.

Oprah: Just because you’re not racist doesn’t mean you’re not a racist

by Ben Shapiro, FrontPage Magazine

Oprah Winfrey is a cultural mover and shaker. That much is clear after her historically inaccurate film The Butler, which portrays Ronald Reagan as a doddering racist and ignores the legacy of bigotry of Southern Democrats, finished first last week at the box office. Seventy-two percent of those who went to see the film cited Oprah’s participation as a factor in favor of their buying a ticket. Sadly, Oprah has used that power to push a false racial narrative directly at odds with the racial narrative pushed by The Butler.

First, The Butler’s racial narrative. The movie, as Oprah has said, begins with a lynching in 1926 and ends with President Barack Obama in the White House. The notion is that Obama marks the culmination of a centuries-long movement toward equality for blacks in America, a popular perspective that largely explains Obama’s election in 2008.

Then there’s Oprah’s actual racial narrative. In her view, President Obama remains an exception to a broader racist rule. Trayvon Martin, Oprah says, is just today’s Emmitt Till, murdered in 1955 by the Ku Klux Klan. So what if racism in America is at an all-time low? So what if the vast majority of Americans are not only not racist, but actively anti-racist? That’s not enough for Oprah. “A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist,” she said in a comment that is as challenged syntactically as it is intellectually.

This is paranoia of the highest sort. And it is absolutely crippling to America’s future. If a huge number of Americans believe that racism that is not present in action nonetheless lurks beneath the surface of our life, waiting to burst forth in a conflagration of hate such as that which allegedly claimed Trayvon, there can be no shared future.

But many on the left, including Oprah, apparently don’t want a shared future. They want emotional blackmail. The corollary to the belief that racism hides in the nooks and crannies of the white personality is the belief that the only way to expunge such racism by embracing the philosophy of people like Oprah. If you see The Butler, you’re buying a racial indulgence; if you vote Obama, you’re buying a racial indulgence. Lee Daniels, director of The Butler, told CBS News that white extras cried during the filming of the movie. Presumably, in his view, that meant they were not racist. But what about all the Americans who will never shed tears over The Butler? How will they demonstrate their non-racism, even if there has never been a shred of evidence that they are in fact racist?

That seems to be the perspective not just of many black Americans like Oprah and Daniels, but the perspective of many in various minority communities. For example, in California, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a law declaring that transgender children must be allowed to enter bathrooms of their choice and join sports teams of their choice. The idea here is that this will minimize bullying, as though most Americans bear children with gender identity issues some sort of ill will. The truth is far simpler: Americans have a right to worry that their children will feel uncomfortable in a bathroom next to someone of the opposite sex, no matter what that person believes him or herself to be. That’s not wrong. That’s normal. But the onus has now been placed on children without gender identity issues to explain why they feel uncomfortable at the urinal next to a girl, even if they’ve never bullied a transgender child.

That’s nasty. More than that, it’s an attempt to shape values by implying that everyone is in need of having their fundamental racism, sexism, homophobia overcome by government action. Americans have nothing left to discuss. America is now a country where whites are often perceived as racist until proven innocent. And the only way to prove yourself innocent is to perform acts approved by the leftist establishment.

None of this helps black Americans. All it does is perpetuate power for those who divide us in pursuit of political gain. Hillary Clinton, who has begun touring the country invoking the supposed racism of voter ID supporters, is merely the latest race hustler to attempt this pernicious trick. Unfortunately, it seems to work. And that means that Oprah’s racial narrative is far more influential than The Butler’s.

Ben Shapiro is an attorney and writer and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, and author of the new book “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How The Left Took Over Your TV” from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

‘Even if you don’t use the N-word, you may still be racist’: Oprah

On Thursday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker, stars of Oscar-bait The Butler. During the interview, in which Cooper thoughtfully nodded as Winfrey and Whitaker race-baited, Oprah suggested Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin were equivalent symbols, and that Americans were racist even if they didn’t have ill will toward black people.

When Cooper cited polls showing that black Americans were upset about Trayvon Martin and whites thought too much had been made of the case, Oprah sighed, “Oh, I know, I know. That’s why I love the film in light of this discussion is because it brings context to this discussion. I mean, look at the film, beginning with that lynching scene and ending with walking into Obama’s office, look at what has happened in the span of one man’s lifetime.”

Whitaker chimed in, “This movie reminds us of the circular motion of things still trying working themselves is going on, as in Emmitt Till, and we’re looking at Trayvon, we’re looking at Oscar Grant, we’re looking at all these situations and recognizing we have to move ourselves forward with this change.” Oprah said, “Emmitt Till became a symbol for those times as Emmitt Till has become a symbol for this time. I mean, there are multiple Trayvon Martins whose names never make the newspapers or the headlines. The circumstances surrounding that allowed that to be. There were multiple Emmitt Tills, there were multiple lynchings, there were multiple young black boys whose names are not remembered and often not even recorded.”

Cooper asked, “It’s amazing to me how people from different backgrounds see this.” He then talked about a juror “who did not understand, did not feel linked to Trayvon Martin, felt connected to George Zimmerman in a way, but not Trayvon Martin, she felt race was not part of this case at all.”

Oprah couldn’t wait to jump in, blurting, “People don’t feel it’s race because people don’t call it race…A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist. But to me it’s ridiculous to look at that case and not to think that race was involved.” – breitbart.com

Oprah Winfrey accuses Swiss shop of ‘racism’, gets apology

Switzerland is a glamorous playground of the rich and famous, filled with glitterati from princes to movie stars. It’s also a land with a sometimes uneasy relationship with foreigners – especially when they aren’t white.

Billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey says she ran into Swiss racism when a clerk at Trois Pommes, a pricey Zurich boutique, refused to show her a $38,000 handbag, telling one of the world’s richest women that she wouldn’t be able to afford it. Winfrey earned $77 million in the year ending in June, according to Forbes magazine.

“She said: ‘No, no, no, you don’t want to see that one. You want to see this one. Because that one will cost too much; you will not be able to afford that,'” Winfrey, appearing on the U.S. television program “Entertainment Tonight,” quoted the clerk as saying. “And I said, ‘Well, I did really want to see that one.’ And she refused to get it.”

She brought up the incident during an interview about her new movie, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” which opens next week and focuses on civil rights and race relations in the U.S. She was asked to open up about her own experiences with discrimination.

Swiss tourism officials and the boutique owner were quick to offer apologies Friday.

“We are very sorry for what happened to her, of course, because we think all of our guests and clients should be treated respectfully, in a professional way,” Daniela Baer, a spokeswoman for the Swiss tourism office, told The Associated Press.

The tourism office also posted an apology on Twitter, saying, “This person acted terribly wrong.”

The newspaper Blick described the bag as a crocodile-leather Tom Ford design named for actress Jennifer Aniston, a fan of the American designer. It quoted Goetz as saying the bag was priced at 35,000 Swiss francs.

Boutique owner Trudie Goetz told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that she believed the incident was a misunderstanding when the store clerk, who is mainly an Italian speaker, explained how expensive the bag was.

“I’m very sorry about this incident,” Goetz said. “And this can only happen because of a communication problem and a misunderstanding.

“The shop assistant apparently asked her (Oprah) if she would like to see the bag, but she apparently said ‘No, I just want to look’. And then she (Oprah) asked how much the bag costs and she (the employee) told her how much the bag was.”

Goetz added that “I believe she rather said something like ‘we have some less expensive’ – ‘we also have some less expensive bags’ and not ‘it’s too expensive for you.’ “

Winfrey was in Switzerland to attend the wedding of her longtime friend Tina Turner, who has lived in Zurich for many years and has been quoted saying how much she enjoys living among the Swiss. Turner was granted a passport earlier this year, a process that typically takes years.

Goetz, who was photographed at Turner’s wedding, stressed that the Oprah incident “has nothing to do with racism – really. Tina Turner is one of my best friends and it’s out of the question (that this has anything to do with racism).”

About 23 percent of Switzerland’s 8 million residents are non-Swiss, and the country earned more than $39 billion from tourism in 2011.

Last year, though, a government-appointed commission reported that immigrants, tourists, asylum-seekers and “people of a different skin color” can encounter “xenophobia and racism in certain areas of life.”

The nationalistic Swiss People’s Party, which has the largest number of seats in the federal parliament, has won support through claims that immigrants can bring crime and social problems to a country that has been an oasis of stability even in Europe’s darkest days.

In recent years, the People’s Party has successfully campaigned to ban the construction of minarets in a country that has about 400,000 Muslims, and to tighten the nation’s asylum law. Swiss lawmakers also narrowly rejected a proposal to ban veils worn by some Muslim women in public.

And this week, a row broke out over plans to bar asylum-seekers living in the small town of Bremgarten from visiting public swimming pools and attending schools.

Human Rights Watch said the agreement by the Swiss migration office to let the town impose “house rules” to limit access to schools and sports facilities violates international law.

It wasn’t the first time Winfrey has taken issue with treatment at a ritzy European boutique. In 2005, she was turned away from a Hermes shop in Paris 15 minutes after closing time. The store said it was closed for a private event.

A Hermes executive appeared on Winfrey’s talk show to apologize for the “rigid and rude” behavior of the employee. Winfrey complimented Hermes on its response – including sensitivity training for employees – and urged viewers to buy the company’s products.

In “The Butler,” Winfrey plays the wife of a butler who is a witness to history, from the cotton fields of Georgia to the White House. It is based loosely on the career of Eugene Allen, a black man who served as a White House butler from the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations.

During the TV interview, Winfrey said that “true racism is about being able to have power over somebody else,” and that she sometimes encounters it along with sexism in boardrooms. Then she recounted the incident in Zurich while she went shopping alone.

“Obviously, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ is not shown in Zurich. So this doesn’t happen to me unless somebody obviously doesn’t know that it’s me,” she said.

A spokesman for Zurich’s tourist office, Christian Trottmann, called the incident “very regrettable” and said it obviously hurts the image of a friendly, world-class city accustomed to different cultures.

“We are inviting her to come back to Zurich and have fun here,” he said, “so she can see how open-minded this city really is.” – AP

Oprah’s latest race baiting venture

In this weekend’s issue, Parade features a very personal conversation with Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and director Lee Daniels (Precious) about their new movie and the questions it raises about race in America.

The “powerful chronicle” of one black man’s years of service in the White House during the most tumultuous period in the nation’s civil rights history, Lee Daniels’ The Butler (in theaters Aug. 16) was a “labor of love” for the trio.

Whitaker, 52, plays Cecil Gaines, whose experiences attending presidents from Eisenhower through Reagan are loosely based on those of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who died in 2010.

Winfrey, 59, in her first dramatic role since 1998’s Beloved, plays Gaines’s wife, Gloria, who battles a drinking problem and watches her husband clash with their activist son.

The film revisits major events—the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations—through their impact on the Gaines family.

On using the N-word, Lee Daniels calls it a word he used quite a bit, until Oprah sat him down and talked to him about its power.

Winfrey says she feels strongly about it. “I always think of the millions of people who heard that as their last word as they were hanging from a tree.” – Parade